Just finished oracle of ages!!! Good game, good game. I have Thoughts.
I actually really enjoyed the story and characters! I figured going into the oracle games that it'd be a simple, cliché story, not much nuance or depth, and with Seasons that's basically what I got: din gets fridged in a crystal at the start of the game -> go get her -> you need a set of maguffins to do so -> fight big monster.
Admittedly it was the first game, which meant less story, but even if I hadn't linked (heh) the games for extra end game content Ages just did so much more.
Unlike din, naryu has someone else willing to help her. Ralph (the twinkiest twink to ever twink) was a young man who was her devoted friend (there was a weird crush triangle thing going on with him, Link and naryu, I always felt like I was missing subtext) and, spoilers for a 20yo game?? I guess?
He was the dethroned descendant of the ancient queen Ami. His family definitely still have big money though. He was pretty clearly supposed to be a comic relief character with a twist, but I ended up really liking him! He was over enthusiastic and over confident, but not unintelligent, a decent swordsman (I think) who was incredibly loyal to his friends and held some deep rooted responsibility for the people his family used to rule. Kind, determined, good with kids and people in general, he was terrified but willing to sacrifice his very existence to save the people.
The world building was also great! I don't think I've ever played a zelda game without gorons, but hylians were in short supply. To be expected outside of hyrule, I guess? Anyway, there were also lizard people on an island (tokay!) whose entire deal was.. A bit outdated? Rude, brazen and aggressive to outsiders, they lived in crude huts, worshipped things they didn't quite understand and were generally the old Hollywood stereotype of an isolated jungle tribe.
There was also, like, zora racism? There's a zora village underwater, and one of them was like 'us sea zora are nothing like those river zora 😒' which handily solved both my question of if the river/ocean zora divide was canon or fanon and the relationships between the two. Are they even the same species?? It just makes the rito even weirder but hey lmao. In all honesty I was pretty sick of the river zora at that point too, I swear there were two of them popping up in every screen that had even a sliver of water deeper than the knees and they CONSTANTLY shot fireballs istg they were such a pain. They were literally everywhere and so hard to kill.
On the plus side mermaid suit ^u^!! A dungeon item (the mermaids cave), the item had a desc like 'the skin of the mythical beast' which raised SO many more questions than it answered. The zora were delighted to see a young mermaid! The use of 'maid' implied either a) the zora all thought link was a girl and he didn't correct them (eyo genderqueer androgeny) b) the zora don't subscribe to gender the way humans do (eyo genderqueer androgeny) or c) all fish people look like mermaids regardless of their specific gender (eyo genderqueer androgeny). It literally could have been all three who knows. Maybe one day we'll actually meet a mermaid in zelda.
Also, there's a mini game in Seasons, which I played first, the subrosian dance. It's a pretty popular part of their culture, it's got music, it's got professional dancers. In Ages, you find the gorons doing the exact same dance! Rosa, a subrosian performer you meet in Seasons, is also there, saying her people's dance is better (tbf it is), but if you go to the past you'll find the gorons actually invented the dance first, as part of their love of games and entertainment, and you can talk to two subrosians who are talking about bringing the dance home! It's so interesting to see little details like this, where the travelling subrosians visited their fellow cave dweller lava eating people centuries ago, brought it back home where it exploded in popularity and centuries later became refined as a whole folk dance with spinning and everything, with the people forgetting where it came from, where the gorons keep their dance exactly the same (having to do a rhythm game without rhythm is hard).
Actually, there was so much political fantasy drama going on in the past?? Like, you've got the childless queen taking care of her people, a budding village and a few more settlements across the kingdom. Early in her reign she tried to build a tower to act as a beacon to her fiancé lost at sea, which is a romance story all on its own, but it was cut short (maybe because of funding?). Centuries in the future, it's just ruins. You've got people living on an ACTIVE VOLCANO starting a symmetry cult around a artifact called 'tuni nut' which, presumably, stabilises the volcano? And it's entirely cut off from the outside world. The goron elder is crushed under rocks and their economy is failing. The zora king got poisoned and he's about to die without an heir because a witch turned the fairy queen into an octorock, but the man in charge of the only cure refuses to hand it over until someone passes his tests.
Most of it is solved relatively easily by link and a copious amount of time travel, but the thing with the ruling queen only gets worse. When the evil witch invades the kingdom, she possesses the oracle of ages, naryu (who's a little implied to be the Actual Creation Goddess Naryu reincarnated) and travels back to the past to bring about an age of despair in the present. She does this by slipping into the royal court and befriending the queen as a serving girl, rising up the ranks to become her closest advisor and corrupting her (pretty sure mind control magic is used a li'l). She convinces her to restart the black tower project, pouring all of her and the towns resources into it - forcibly conscripting every able bodied worker and working them to the bone, all while monsters start to circle the tower. With all the fear and resentment, it quickly becomes a beacon of dark energy, a perfect focal point to perform black magics.
Link (and Ralph) end up in the past and get hauled in front of the queen, with possessed naryu at her side, who basically jeers at them and ensures the queen won't listen to their untrustworthy lies. The townsfolk are getting increasingly stressed as their village fills with rubble and their men are worked to the point of collapse. Armed guards start to appear to keep the workers under control. Eventually, Ralph uncovers a hole in the guard rotation, and he and link sneak into the palace through a secret entrance Ralph oh so casually knows about. Link and naryu fight, but with stupendous timing the queen walks in to see naryu collapsed on the floor, Link standing over her with a sword. She calls for the guards, but before anyone can react, the witch, banished form her first vessel, leaps into the queen herself instead. Ralph shoves past the arriving guards and into naryus arms, while link moves in from of them. The queen orders the guards to attack, but naryu, reawakened, pulls them back to the present in the nick of time. In the present, the black tower is magically growing, reaching higher and higher into the sky, terrifying the people of the city.
Then! Ralph, who at this point is suspiciously invested now his actual goal is completed and naryu is safe, vows to go back into time again, away from naryu, to live under the now evil queen and bring protection and comfort to the villagers as a direct act of resistance, because the witch is feeding on their sorrow to power an unknown ritual (link knows. Link, canonically, has told nobody). So this teen in fancy robes and cape goes back to the oppressed, poverty stricken town under the thumb if someone who wants him dead and lives there for weeks if not months dedicating himself to supporting the village and bringing people's hopes and spirits back up, presumably while living out of someone else's wooden hut. In the middle of a literal depression inducing miasma that's sapping everyone's joy and will to live.
That just. Takes insane strength of character. That's a feat of pure, distilled, compassion as anarchy.
Link's off bouncing between past and present doing dungeons and solving easier issues through either sword or magic item, but Ralph is out here doing the long hard slog for little reward.
Link finally returns to the black tower completed, affecting even the people of the present, and, preparations complete, rushes to the past. Ralph is nowhere be seen. Talking to the villagers reveals several have a crush on him, but an old man saw him running for the tower, sword drawn. There's a man pacing by the entrance, who saw the kid run in, tried to stop him. He said Ralph said that he no longer cared what happened to him. That the man realised that Ralph had quietly succumbed to the same curse of despair they all were under. Link fights his way up to the top of the tower, where Ralph confronts the evil queen, sword at her heart, but every step she takes into it, he steps back. The witch laughs. She asks him if he's really willing to write himself out of existence - being the queens descendant, and all. Ralph leaps back, into links chest. He's shaking and stuttering, but he lunges, and is knocked out in one blow. The queen now asks link the same question: is he willing to erase Ralph? If he strikes her, kills her, the queen will die, childless, and he will never live. She leaves, and link rushes to Ralph. He's awake but unresponsive, defeated. With a heavy heart, Link leaves him to chase the queen. It's naryu who finds him, brings him out of the tower.
When the witch is defeated, the curse is lifted, and Ralph is once more energetic and kind. He's a little quieter now, though, sticking close to naryu. For all he was a loud and headstrong kid, I gotta say I was very impressed.
He would have made a good king.
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Worm Arc 11 Interludes thoughts:
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Ok. Just in order I think. Sorry for the chaos.
Started off with puppies. I was happy.
Then the puppies started getting a little more violent than needed. I was less happy.
Then Victoria got clowned on a little and I was little bit more happy.
Then the unkillable naked zebra lady showed up everything kinda went downhill. For everyone.
Bitch do not join the supervillain serial killer group, please and thank you.
Seriously though, The Siberian is a bit scary. Just, completely invincible as far as anyone can tell. And super strong.
Theo is having a bad day. And unless someone takes care of Jack Slash for him he's gonna have a bad few years.
Jack Slash is such a poser oh my god. Dude. Come one. You aren't all that.
Also. Jack. Do not toss a loaded baby! That baby had a full diaper. You toss that baby and you are liable to have a containment breach. Speaking from experience, you do not want a containment breach. (Also just don't throw babies of course.)
I hope Theo gets cool powers and is able to become a super amazing hero like he dreams of. On the plus side, probably gonna be lots of opportunities for trigger events coming up. On the minus side, he didn't trigger when Jack Slash was planning on killing him so I don't know if he's gonna be able to.
They were obviously going to go for Labyrinth. She has such amazing powers for mass terror. Though I guess Burnscar never tried to actually recruit her. I assume that was the plan though.
Also Burnscar needs to stop excusing her actions. Just be evil or don't be evil. You don't get to be evil and say it's not your fault (that sure will come up again in these interludes).
I fucking LOVED the description of how Labyrinths powers work. Just the details of everything. So good!
Fucking Colin. Of course they had to go for you. Why can't you just go away and leave my robot daughter alone?
Mannequin is fucking WILD. Like, god damn. Those are sure choices you made. Helps you be creepy as shit though. And get through air vents.
Mannequin writing out "U ME" to Pocketknife Man by laying keyboard keys down on the table one at a time has cursed meet-cute energy.
In the end, Colin survives cause my robot daughter saves him. And I guess she's gonna tell him the truth about being an AI. Fiiiiiiine. I will be polite to Colin if he comes over to dinner. He still needs to apologize to my other daughter though.
Also I'm sure glad the Slaughterhouse Nine won't have any use for the magic pocketknife that can cut through anything that Mannequin took. No worries at all I'm sure. It won't do jack shit for them. Might as well just slash the idea and toss the knife out.
Cool. Some Nazis died. That's great!
Not enough though. Disappointed in Shatterbird.
But if one good thing can come of this whole Slaughterhouse Nine thing, maybe Hookwolf can die. I'm not holding my breath though.
Shatterbird has a very interesting power set. Being specifically glass focused like that. Definitely can see how she would terrorize a city.
Dinah PoV. DINAH POV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok well first off, I obviously hated Coil for Dinah already. Enough that I don't really know if the Dinah PoV can technically make me hate him more. But that said, I hate him more. WTF.
The description of her power was so NEAT though! Had a minor moment of "oh hey this paragraph of this precog talking about her power works inside her head is an almost perfect description of how my brain works" which was wild. I don't actually get to see the future though, which is a major difference.
She can actually just full blow see a possible future holy shit! Wow. Like it hurts and she hates it but it's still crazy.
Also I guessed that Crawler was going to come for Traveler in a Vault (that is Noelle's cape name until I am told different) after the Bitch interlude. I was very happy I got that right since I really knew almost nothing about either.
So Crawler just basically can't die and gets stronger every time he gets hurt. I wonder how long it will take him to reach Endbringer level power?
And Traveler in a Vault is just a large monster that is always hungry and can be driven to the point of eating people. That sucks a lot for her.
Also Leviathan came after her too huh? Well that's probably fine and won't matter in the future.
Regent's sister is worse than he is. That's impressive! Like, not good impressive. But impressive.
Getting real close to the "can't exist" physic power set. I guess it's not quite it though.
She should keep a better eye on her phone battery.
AMY DALLON! I knew it would be you.
I knew you were destined to be a tragedy from the moment I met you. You were always going to become a villain. So once I knew the Nine were recruiting it was a guarantee that you'd be recruited.
Specifically, that you'd be recruited by Bonesaw. She is an artist and obviously she is obsessed over the art you could make together.
Holy shit though that chapter.
Lets see. FUCK CAROL. Victoria gets some excuses, she's a kid, she's following her mom's example, etc. But FUCK CAROL. You are partially responsible for what Amy is about to become.
Despite being terrified, Amy seemed to have a dark fascination with everything Bonesaw was doing and saying. Really listened as Bonesaw explained things.
The more detailed view of what Amy's power does is crazy. She really can do just about anything to someone.
“Why not fix your dad?” is where Bonesaw won. It's about 3/5 of the way through the chapter. And she won at that point. That was the killing blow. The rest of the chapter, the remaining 3.5k or so words, is watching Amy bleed out to drive the point home. It is Panacea's death monologue. It is beautiful and tragic and amazing.
All that said, since she is losing anyway, is it bad for me to want more of Bonesaw's notes? SHE HAS LORE! GIVE IT TO ME!
Dad at least seems pretty good. He made the perfect response after getting healed. Unfortunately she was already gone.
AND THERE IT IS. THERE IS THE THAT FINAL STEP. Fucking rewire your adopted sisters mind to have romantic feelings for you. No you don't get to say it was an accident! You chose to do it. Holy shit Amy. You are going to be an amazing (terrifying) villain.
Callback to Burnscar and blaming her power for her actions.
If Worm was a Disney movie Amy would end up with the best song, 100%. Hellfire or similar levels.
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